Nick Barlow's blog

It’s a well-documented phenomenon in British politics that the Conservative Party Conference is where some of the oddest ideas in British politics go to get an airing. As Political Scrapbook points out, there are many made ideas getting out into the open this week, but I wanted to highlight a couple.

First up, we have Tony Baldry MP, who has clearly discovered the history of the National Liberals and seems to think it would be a good idea to resurrect them. And just as the National Liberals were eventually subsumed into the Tories, so would their new version – in exchange for Tory candidates standing down, they’d have to agree to support the Conservatives in Parliament. In other words, they’d be Tories under another banner, but this is a good idea for Baldry because he believes “The country has been trying to manage three Parties, in a House of Commons and an electoral system essentially designed for two.”

It’s nice that a Tory MP admits that our electoral system doesn’t work well when there are multiple parties competing, but his solution to that problem is somewhat odd. In effect, if the people have the temerity to have a wide range of views that need a wide range of parties to represent them, they should learn better and only expect to have two parties. If they dare to vote for multiple parties, well, those extraneous ones will have to be removed to stop people like Tony Baldry being confused. After all, how can you have an orderly Parliament when there are people there who don’t automatically vote with the Conservatives or Labour?

In other news, Ipswich MP Ben Gummer has been complaining about councillors, saying that they’re ‘mediocre people’. The fact that Ipswich was run by a Conservative-led coalition that lost seats and power to Labour may have something to do with his comments, but I wouldn’t want to ascribe all of his comments to that. No, when he starts advocating the return of the business vote and talking about the Corporation of London as a model for other local government, it’s clear that he’s motivated by other factors too, such as a contempt for democracy.

However, while it’s a silly comment being made a fringe meeting, I’ve seen other comments by Conservatives nationally decrying councils as somehow blocking prosperity – much of the thinking behind the National Planning Policy Framework is based on the principle, and Nick Boles was playing the mood music for it a couple of years ago. While the coalition has said there’ll be no local government rearrangement in this Parliament, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some form of local government reform being promised in the next Tory manifesto (probably alongside promises that it would ‘unleash growth’ and ‘promote efficiency’) with the intention being to gerrymander as much as possible into large shire county unitaries where the urban votes are drowned out by the rural ones. And if that doesn’t work, start giving people who are likely to vote Tory multiple votes and eliminate any of those pesky small parties who might confuse the issue.

This weblog is purely a personal site and unless explicity stated otherwise any opinions stated are purely personal and do not represent those of Colchester Liberal Democrats, Castle Ward Liberal Democrats or Colchester Borough Council.